WASHINGTON (ABP) — Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who became a household name recently after video snippets of his sermons created a stir on the Internet and a headache for his most famous parishioner, is defending himself in an interview that was televised April 25.
The video clips, which began showing up on YouTube and were seized on by journalists and talk-radio hosts in February and March, contained comments that some have interpreted as anti-American and anti-white.
“I felt it was unfair, I felt it was unjust, I felt it was untrue — I felt that those who were doing that were doing it for some very devious reasons,” Wright said, when PBS journalist Bill Moyers asked him how he felt when he first saw the clips and how they were being used.
The interview with Wright, who recently retired as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is his first since the controversy broke. It will be shown on “Bill Moyers Journal.” Trinity, which counts Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. Barack Obama among its members, is the largest church in its denomination and one of only a few predominantly African-American congregations in the largely white UCC.
For example, perhaps the most inflammatory clip came from a 2003 sermon in which Wright recounted the historically inequitable treatment of African-Americans by state and federal officials. “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.' No, no, no. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people,” Wright exclaimed. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
A message Wright preached the Sunday after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks also has drawn significant fire. In it, he noted that Americans seemed shocked and bewildered that anyone would want to visit their country with violence.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” he said in the Sept. 16, 2001, sermon. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.”
Obama has been an active member of Trinity for more than 20 years and has credited Wright with helping bring him to Christ and being a spiritual mentor. But, in response to the uproar, Obama delivered a speech in which he denounced his pastor's most controversial statements.
While acknowledging that his pastor came of age in a day when African-Americans were burdened under segregation's heavy yoke, the candidate said that Wright's words nonetheless “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country — a view that sees white racism as endemic, that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”
In that sense, Obama continued, “Rev. Wright's comments weren't only wrong but divisive — divisive at a time at which we need unity.”
But, in the PBS interview, Wright said the out-of-context nature of the clips created a false impression of his beliefs — but that both his sermons and the people who excerpted them were sending exactly the messages they wanted to, respectively.
“Persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly,” he told Moyers. “When something is taken like a sound bite for political purposes and put constantly over and over again — looped in the face of the public — that's not a failure to communicate; those who are doing that are communicating exactly what they want to do, which is to paint me as some sort of fanatic.”
Wright told Moyers — himself a member of a congregation that is dually aligned with the UCC and the American Baptist Churches USA — that he thought the sermon clips were intended to distort his image.
“I think that they want to communicate that … I am unpatriotic, that I am un-American, that I am full of — filled with hate speech, that I have a cult at Trinity United Church of Christ, and by the way, guess who goes to his church, hint-hint-hint; that's what they wanted to communicate,” he said.
“They know nothing about the church,” Wright said, ticking off a list of Trinity's many social ministries in its economically depressed neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. “They know nothing about all that we try to do as a church and have tried to do and still continue to do as a church that believes what [University of Chicago Christian scholar] Martin Marty said, that the two worlds have to be together, and that the gospel of Jesus Christ has to speak to those worlds — not only in terms of the preached message on a Sunday morning, but in terms of the lived-out ministry throughout the week.”